


run, boy, run

by taizi



Series: full circle [11]
Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Gen, also nishimura has a crush on natori but who can blame him, mentions of one-sided kitanishi, we're back baby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2019-11-15 06:01:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18067925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taizi/pseuds/taizi
Summary: Nishimura has a cursed mark on his arm, a crush on Natsume’s famous idol friend, and a whole lot of brand new problems that start and end with that taboo circle he found.





	1. Chapter 1

Satoru is half-aware he’s staring, but he can’t help it. It’s _Natori Shuuichi._ And he’s _right there._ Gorgeous, and talented, and charming, and smiling at him, and--

And there’s a lizard on his face. And it’s _moving._

Satoru stares as it crawls from Natori’s cheek across the bridge of his nose and disappears again beneath his hair. Somewhere behind him, Taki is stifling giggles against Tanuma’s shoulder.

“I’ll admit, I still prefer this to our first meeting,” Natori says cheerfully. It snaps Satoru out of it.

“Oh, I’m-- sorry! Sorry, Natori-san, I was just-- “

His friends are outright laughing at him now, and Satoru feels about three seconds away from combusting on the spot. He clutches Fish closer and focuses all his energy on sinking into the ground and disappearing forever.

“Alright, enough,” Natsume says, giving his _famous idol friend_ a severe look for his teasing. “I thought you said you had an idea?”

“Right, right. Have a seat, everyone, please.”

They’re in the sitting room of a big empty house that Natori says he’s borrowing from a friend for awhile. He’s only in the location for a few months, filming the season finale of a TV drama. A drama that Satoru used to follow _voraciously,_ for all that he hasn’t even thought about it in weeks. How could he have completely forgotten something he was so looking forward to?

“So to begin, I have to ask,” Natori says, “how long have you been able to see yokai, Nishimura?”

Fish is being weirdly clingy. When he lets her go, hops out of Satoru’s hands to huddle on his shoulder, when normally she’d be flapping all over the place and trying to pick up anything that wasn’t bolted down. He doesn’t mind, lifting a hand to stroke her quivering breast feathers with a finger.

“Probably like three months now, I guess?” he says slowly. “Maybe a little longer? I don’t remember exactly. Nothing really happened at first. Then two weeks ago I met a yokai in the park and it-- grabbed me.”

He’s wearing short sleeves, so the marks on his wrist are visible to Natsume and Natori, but he shifts his arm forward across the table anyway.

“It looks sort of medium today,” Satoru adds lamely. It’s nowhere near the horrific broken-bone black and purple it was originally, and it’s not the faded yellows and blues of healing bruises either. “It’s like a mood ring, but I can’t tell how to read it most of the time.”

Natsume loudly puts his face in his hands. Kitamoto says, “Can you never refer to your literal curse as a mood ring ever again?”

“It might as well be good for _something_ if it’s just gonna sit there,” Satoru argues hotly. “Natori probably figured out a bunch of uses for his curse, too.”

Natori is staring at him with a complicated expression. His glittery good humor has faded into something sort of grim. His left hand moves to cover his right, where the little black lizard is curled in his palm like a sleeping pet.

“I see,” he says at length, probably to the first part of what Satoru told him, gracefully ignoring everything else. “I’ve never heard of someone coming into this ability so late in life.”

“Well, I mean, I was possessed once,” Satoru tells him helpfully. “A little while after Natsume first transferred to our school. It wasn’t his fault, and he totally saved me, but I guess after that I was sort of more sensitive to this stuff. Maybe that’s why the circle worked so well.”

If Natori sounded grim before, he sounds absolutely frigid now. “Yes, Natsume mentioned you had used one of the seeing circles. I don’t see how that granted you the sight, though, unless-- “

Satoru reaches for the collar of his shirt and pulls it down and to the side, just enough to expose his circle where it sits in its usual spot on the front of his shoulder. Natori’s mouth clicks shut so hard it must have hurt his teeth. He whirls on Natsume with a glare that could have knocked him over.

“You let him draw it on his _skin?”_

“I didn’t _let_ him do anything,” Natsume snaps right back in a voice he’s absolutely never used on any one of his friends. Nyanko-sensei, on his shoulder, bristles at Natori’s tone; looking less like a cat with every second. “It took me _days_ to work up the courage to tell Tanuma that I could see yokai, and that was _after_ meeting his father. You really think I would invite the very first friend I ever made to put himself in this kind of danger? When he was already possessed once because of me? You think I would-- “

“Enough, Natsume,” a masked yokai says. She appears out of nowhere, and Satoru jumps in surprise, but Natsume doesn’t react beyond whipping his wounded eyes at her. “He misspoke. You know he doesn’t believe that of you.”

Her words are for Natsume, but they definitely seem to be aimed at Natori. The man winces a little and rubs his face with his hand, the lizard skittering down his wrist to hide beneath his sleeve. He abruptly looks very tired, and very much like he regrets letting the conversation spiral out of control.

“I don’t know what just happened,” Taki says in a hard voice, “but if this is anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I dropped a paper and Nishimura found it. It wasn’t Natsume’s fault at all. He didn’t want us messing with this stuff in the first place.”

Tanuma puts a hand on Natsume’s arm, who settles beneath the touch like a disquieted cat, and they do that thing where they have a whole conversation in their silence.

“I think we’re all sort of avoiding the fact that _I’m_ the one who picked up the circle and drew it in the first place,” Satoru says, folding his arms. The curse on his wrist twinges, its steady ache increasing into something a little more painful. Fish flaps her wings, agitated, but that’s probably more to do with the tension in the room than anything else. “Just because I’m the one who’s in trouble here doesn’t mean it’s not still totally my fault. If we’re just gonna sit and point fingers at each other, then me and Acchan are going to that smoothie store we passed on the way here.”

“I never agreed to that,” Kitamoto says half-heartedly.

“I didn’t mean to raise my voice,” Natori says, muffled behind his hand. “Natsume, I’m sorry.”

Natsume shrugs stiffly, staring hard at the tabletop. And then a moment passes, and his features soften, because he’s a pushover for the people he loves. “I know. I’m sorry, too.”

“There are techniques that are forbidden,” Natori explains in a careful tone. “Things that the exorcist community considers taboo. That circle is one of them. A big one of them. If word were to get out-- if someone were to see you-- then you kids could be in big trouble.”

Satoru squints at him. “They’d call the cops on us?”

“What?” Natori says, dumbfounded. “No.”

“So we’re not, like, breaking any laws or anything.”

“I mean-- no.”

“It’s Taki’s grandpa’s circle, so she should be allowed to do whatever she wants with it. It’s her inheritance or whatever.”

“She could get it patented,” Kitamoto jumps in. He looks meanly pleased just to have something to argue with Natori about, not that Satoru has any idea why. “Then you guys would have to have _her_ permission to use it.”

Natori looks as though he has a headache. The masked yokai behind him has absolutely no tells, but Satoru can’t help thinking she seems amused. “You wouldn’t be in trouble _legally._ You would just-- make a lot of enemies.”

“The more you talk about exorcists the more you make it sound like you’re in a really shady cult,” Satoru tells him sympathetically.

Tanuma chokes on his tea. Taki whispers, “A shady cult,” like it’s the best thing she’s ever heard.

“I think I’ve decided I don’t like children,” Natori says brightly, clapping his hands together. “At all. Natsume, you’re the exception, but you’re really trying my patience today, I’ll have you know.”

Probably because Natsume is laughing silently, shoulders shaking. It’s a much better look on him than that wounded rage from earlier was, so Satoru will take it.

“All jokes aside,” Natori says, sobering. “There are very dangerous people in this country, with very dangerous ideas. You may not think it’s a big deal, but I do. And I have quite a bit more experience than you. Do you think that’s fair of me to say?”

Satoru shifts a little, feeling scolded. “Yeah,” he mutters, reaching up to pet Fish.

“I’ll ask that you please stop wearing the circle,” Natori goes on. When Satoru’s head snaps up, gaze flying back to him in shock, Natori holds up a hand. “Hear me out. We don’t know if the circle is exacerbating the curse or not. Using that magic in this way is a completely untested field, as far as I know. I’d like to solve one problem at a time.”

Satoru is stunned, and outraged, and somewhat terrified. “But-- there are-- you can’t-- “

His arm _hurts._ Natsume says, “Nishimura, hold on-- “

“There are monsters,” Satoru blurts. “Everywhere. And I know they’re there now. You can’t ask me to walk around blind, not when I _know._ What if the creepy yokai comes back? What if it catches me ‘cause I couldn’t see it to run away?”

A familiar arm wraps around his shoulders, and he’s tugged in tight against Kitamoto’s side. His heart is racing, and he scrabbles for something to hold onto. He tries to grab Kitamoto’s hand, but he reaches with the wrong hand. The sudden move causes a twinge up his injured arm that makes him flinch away.

Fish screeches, a rattling sound like an old wind-up toy. The noise is deafening, since she’s right there next to Satoru’s ear, and the most sound she’s made since they came here in the first place; but it manages to cut clean through his panic. It cuts clean through the argument happening on the other side of the table, too, leaving the room in a pocket of tense silence.

Fish screeches again for good measure, and then busies herself with preening Satoru’s hair in brisk, businesslike flips of her beak.

“The runt is right,” Nyanko-sensei says, jumping down from Natsume’s shoulder to sit on the table. “You humans will find the most annoying way of going about anything. The brat will need a bodyguard to keep an eye on things, and he’s already got a devoted ayakashi right here with him who fits the bill.”

“What?” Satoru asks dumbly, at the same time Natori says, “The bird?”

She flaps down to the table next to the lucky cat, looking very animal-like compared to Nyanko-sensei’s weird proportions and round head. Satoru watches carefully, tense under Kitamoto’s arm, because he doesn’t quite trust the grumpy cat not to try something underhanded.

“What’re you gonna do to her?” he asks suspiciously.

“Be careful, sensei,” Natsume warns him.

Nyanko-sensei huffs and ignores them both, and a symbol lights up on his forehead. It glows bright enough to blind, and Satoru is blinking away sunspots by the time it fades away again.

Fish rustles her wings, gives a derisive little squawk, and hops back to Satoru’s side of the table.

Taki gives a soft gasp. “I see her!”

“A magpie,” Tanuma says, looking a little awed. “She’s pretty, Nishimura.”

She looks pleased with herself, for all that she didn’t really do anything. Natsume picks up his cat, who tells them, “In a few more years she probably would have gathered enough power for a physical form on her own, but I gave her a boost. Problem solved. If anything happens, she’ll be able to warn her boy and everyone else.”

Hiiragi returns from the kitchen and passes Natori a damp dishtowel. Satoru wonders what that must have looked like to Kitamoto, Tanuma and Taki. Did they see the towel float over, or is the towel invisible too when a yokai is the one holding it?

I’ll get to find out soon enough, Satoru thinks miserably.

Natori passes the towel across the table to him, something gentle and understanding in his eyes, for all that he’s not going to budge on this.

Satoru hikes his shirt up enough to rub at the circle on his shoulder with the towel. Cool beads of water run down his chest and stomach, raising goosebumps, and with every smear of the ink, the yokai around him get less and less defined.

He bites the inside of his lip when Hiiragi finally fades out of his line of sight completely. He tugs his shirt back down, and lays the ink-splotched towel on the table. He glances at his cursed arm and feels a spark of surprise at how normal it looks, for the first time in weeks.

But the pain of it is still there, and Natsume is giving him a worried look, so it’s probably turned all dark and ugly again. Natori doesn’t look happy either, for all that he got his way.

“It’ll be okay,” Kitamoto assures him. He doesn’t need the sight to see what he needs to, he never has. Not when it comes to Satoru. “Quit stressing yourself out and pet your bird.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Satoru says automatically. He does reach over to pet Fish, though, the familiar smooth and glossy texture of her feathers like a balm beneath his hand. It makes him feel better that he still has her, even if he doesn’t have anything else. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


	2. Chapter 2

Natori looks somewhere between impressed and horrified at the depth and magnitude of Taki’s research, flipping through her notes with something like despair. 

“You _can’t_ have this information,” he says. “Natsume-- you _know_ what kind of danger this puts her in.”

Natsume shifts uncomfortably. Satoru doesn’t envy his being stuck in the middle, especially since Taki has been rearing for a fight all day. _Satoru_ wouldn’t tell Taki what she could and couldn't have, that’s for sure. 

“Like Nishimura said, it’s my inheritance,” Taki says predictably, a steely glint in her eyes. She stared down a giant monster all by herself long before she knew Natsume and Nyanko-sensei, and any human would be small change in comparison. Satoru was totally right to have a crush on her back when he did, and he lives in healthy awe of her now. “Can we please talk about the curse now? I mean, that’s why we came all this way, isn’t it?”

After a moment, in which Natori lifts his eyes to the ceiling as though in silent prayer, he capitulates grudgingly. 

“Very well. I believe you’re on the right track with contagious magic. I have a few contacts in America I’m going to reach out to about your curse, Nishimura.”

On a better day, Satoru probably would have _swooned_ to hear his favorite actor say his name, to his face, _directly._  As it is, he shuffles a bit and busies his hands with keeping Fish out of Tanuma’s food and hopes his face isn’t turning red. 

Kitamoto twitches, and glares darkly at Natori’s handsome smile. 

”But until then, the easy next step is to capture the yokai that marked you.”

 _That_ gets Satoru’s attention. “No, don’t. Keep away from it. It’s-- it’s a _monster,_ it’s-- “

“It’s _okay_ ,” Natsume says before Natori can get a word in edgewise. He leans forward on his elbows, all round eyes and earnest. “He’s good at what he does. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t think we could trust him.”

“Though I do appreciate your concern,” the actor says warmly. He’s smiling again, and it’s slightly different from the glossy smile Satoru sees him wearing on TV. It's more present, somehow. “I’ll have my shiki handle it, and keep it far away from you. If all goes according to plan, you’ll never see it again.”

With a pang, Satoru’s eyes dart past the actor to the empty space behind his shoulder, where Hiiragi usually hovers. His heart plummets, because of _course_ she isn’t there, and _Never see it again_ echoes between his ears like a punishment. 

Fish picks at Kitamoto’s sleeve with her beak, and Kitamoto seems to take that as his cue. 

He stands up, hooking a proprietary hand under Satoru’s elbow, and says, “You said something about smoothies earlier, didn’t you? Let’s go.”

Satoru lets himself be hauled out of his seat, but not without token protest. 

“But we’re finally getting somewhere!”

“We’ll fill you in,” Tanuma says. His expression is one of quiet resolve. He looks up at Satoru like he’s making a promise. “Whatever we talk about while you're gone, we won’t keep it a secret from you.”

And now here they are, in a park a few blocks away from Natori's borrowed house, sharing a bench in the late afternoon sunshine. Satoru has been nursing a strawberry smoothie for long enough that it's beginning to melt, the cold plastic beading condensation that smears beneath his fingers. Next to him, Kitamoto is feeding Fish little bites of whipped cream off the end of his straw. 

“I don’t think this is good for birds,” he says belatedly, looking delighted at the greedy snap of her beak. “But if Natsume’s ugly cat can eat shortcake, I guess she’ll be fine.”

Fish squawks, as though in agreement, and it works a reluctant smile out of Satoru that he didn’t necessarily feel ready to give up. 

“Am I being dumb?” he asks after a moment. “About the circle?”

Kitamoto pauses, and gives him a sidelong look. 

“No.”

“Are you just saying that?”

“Maybe.” Kitamoto rubs the bridge of his nose. It’s a tell Satoru is familiar with. It means he has no clue what to say but he knows he has to think of something. Sure enough, after a second, he goes on doggedly, “I just want you to feel okay. If that circle makes you feel safe, then you should get to keep it. But if it’s the reason you’re— hurt, and scared all the time, then I’m glad it’s gone.” 

His eyes stray to Satoru’s wrist. The bruises are invisible to them both now, but it seems like ever since Kitamoto saw them that first time, he can’t stop seeing them. Like they’re always on his mind, imprinted on his eyes like sunspots. 

It really bothers him. Satoru hates how much it bothers him. 

“Maybe things can go back to how they were, if you can’t see them anymore,” Kitamoto adds, a little bit hopeful. “And you’ll get better.”

Satoru looks at him, his best friend and favorite person, always on Satoru’s side even when it’s weird and scary and doesn’t make any sense. 

“Out of sight, out of mind, huh?” Satoru sits back. His smoothie is melted, dripping condensation on his jeans, but he takes a big gulp anyway. It’s cool and tart, and the sun is high and bright, and there are no sinister shadows in the park— just endless green and sunshine and a few kids playing tag, their laughter carrying over the secret voices of whatever ghosts might be lurking around. 

It’s a jewel of an afternoon, the kind he used to take for granted, and he kind of wants those old days back, too.

“Yeah,” he says, and watches Kitamoto light up. What’s Satoru really giving up, anyway? The only yokai he likes is right here, stealing Kitamoto’s straw out of his cup while he’s distracted, and he can see her just fine. “Let’s try it.” 

They meet up with their friends at the station, because it’s a school night and their families are expecting them back late but if they miss the last bus they’ll be in a brand new world of trouble. Natori is attracting a lot of attention as he sees them off.

When he looks at Satoru his mouth twists almost ruefully. He’s rubbing his cheek in a way that makes Satoru think the little lizard is resting there. 

He lingers a step behind Tanuma as Taki climbs onto the bus and asks, “So what does your curse do?”

Natori blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“Well, it does _something_ ,” Satoru says lamely, and makes a vague gesture at his own arm. “Mine is a mood ring or whatever. Yours moves around and makes shapes. Have you ever talked to it?”

His only answer is bewildered silence. The man’s head moves fractionally to the side, as if he’s listening to a voice in his ear. One of his shiki, Satoru thinks wistfully, before he shakes it off. 

I don’t care, he reminds himself viciously.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” he says, and starts to lift a hand in farewell, and then remembers this is _Natori Shuuichi,_ who he’s wanted to meet _forever_ and who deserves a bit more than a halfhearted wave goodbye. Abruptly self-conscious, Satoru blurts, “Thanks for everything. It was, um— you’re— I’ve seen all your movies? And I’m glad I got to meet you, even if it was just ‘cause of a monster.”

Natori’s expression warms into something amused, and his smile springs back from wherever it disappeared to when Satoru asked about the lizard. Something squirms in Satoru’s stomach that reminds him of the butterflies he used to get when Taki smiled at him.

“Not a problem, Nishimura,” he says. “I should be thanking you, really, for being such a good friend to Natsume. This is small change compared to what you’ve done for him.”

Satoru has no time to compartmentalize what he’s hearing because Kitamoto is stomping back down the stairs to grab Satoru by the sleeve.

“ _Bye_ ,” he says like a promise of bodily harm, and hauls Satoru back onto the bus with him. 

Taki is smothering giggles behind her hand, and Tanuma is staring pointedly out the window with a twist to his mouth that looks like laughter, but Natsume meets Kitamoto’s eyes with a commiserating scowl.

The bus driver gives Satoru a very odd look as he walks by, and it takes him a long moment to realize it's because of the magpie on his shoulder. He's sort of used to no one else seeing her, and freezes mid-step. 

"Um," he says at length.

The bus driver looks past him at Natsume-- specifically at Nyanko-sensei, napping fatly in Natsume's lap-- and seems to give up on them as a group. 

"G'head and find a seat," he says, and closes the bus doors. 

The ride back to Hitoyoshi is uneventful, and maybe Satoru misses some unspoken signal, but no one brings up curses or yokai or anything they talked about at Natori's house. They talk about school instead, and clubs their classmates are in, and what they might do on the weekend. Satoru can feel the weight rolling off his shoulders in pounds, like he's finally shrugging off some heavy suitcases he's been forced to carry around for days, and he slumps against Kitamoto to look out the window at the countryside that goes rushing by. 

By the time they get home, it's late, dusk creeping across the sky in sweeps of vivid indigo. The streetlights gleam like stars all the way through town. 

Taki suggests grabbing a quick bite to eat before they get home, and they end up at the conbini just down the street from the bus terminal. Satoru sits on the curb between Tanuma and Kitamoto, feeding Fish bites of Karaage-kun chicken nuggets and laughing when Nyanko-sensei demands similar spoils from Natsume, and his arm doesn't hurt at all. 

They part ways in ones and twos, Natsume and Tanuma splitting off first to make their way to the Fujiwara house that sits way out on the edge of town. Taki waves goodbye next, taking the left at a crossroads where Kitamoto and Satoru both go right. And when they're walking past Kitamoto's apartment, he lingers for a moment, as though reluctant to go away.

"You can stay here," he says. He's still worried. 

Satoru smiles, knocking their shoulders together. "My mom will be annoyed if I'm not home in the morning. I'll see you at school."

"Yeah, alright," Kitamoto says, unsatisfied. He reaches over to offer Fish a finger, and she clamps it with her beak affectionately, and then he says goodnight. 

Satoru waits until the apartment door closes behind Kitamoto to get a move on. Walking alone, the streetlights don't feel as friendly. They buzz and flicker as he walks by, little swarms of moths going crazy around the bulbs, and Fish tilts her head to study the bugs with interest.

"Don't you start," he warns her. "You've had enough snacks today for a bird three times your size. You ate more of my chicken than I did."

"Interesting pet," an unfamiliar voice says from right beside him.

Satoru yelps in surprise, spinning around so abruptly the magpie on his shoulder baits her wings in alarm, and a young man puts his hands out in apology.

"Didn't mean to scare you! I thought you might have noticed me standing here, but you must not have."

Pressing the heel of his palm to his frantically leaping heart, Satoru tells himself off for being so jumpy. It's a  _person,_ not a yokai, he thinks, irritated at his own self. _R_ _elax._

"It's alright," Satoru says, affecting a sheepish smile. "Did you need something?"

The man smiles back, taking a few neat steps that bring him right up to Satoru's side. In the glow of the streetlight, Satoru can see he's got long dark hair that hangs over over his shoulder in a tail, and a curious eyepatch across his right eye.

Fish's talons are digging painfully into Satoru's shoulders. Her wings are half-open and spread low, as if in warning. 

The man says, "I'm curious about the company you keep, Nishimura-kun."


End file.
